To Arms, Boston: AWP is Coming

Although its voluminous brochure copy never, ever says so, this is a college festival. It is the writing departments of our universities from sea to What’s-A-Tolino?-Shiny sea.

AWP calls itself “the largest literary conference in North America.” Some 11,000 are anticipated, I’m told, in and around the Hynes Convention Center in Boston this week. So dense are these growing appetites that last year in Chicago, it was hard to get something to eat at times during the conference. The area’s restaurants were simply overrun, inventories consumed in the hunger of the quest-academic.

The AWP 2013 Program Book online has 328 pages.

It’s impossible to explain to those who haven’t been to AWP before how hard it will be for them to attract any attention to their own faculty reading or panel discussion on one issue or another. There are thought to be more than 500 such events in the main three days — Thursday, Friday, Saturday — of the event. Here is Thusday’s listing of sessions. You’ll be scrolling for some time. These events are proposed by the various campus programs and are selected or rejected by the conference administration, which is seated at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The event is held in a different city each year. Normally an extremely cold city at an extremely cold time of year. The huge southerly and warmer part of our nation’s topography appears to have no appeal whatever to the halls o’ frozen ivy.

It’s safe to say our #BreakingPinatas panel at #AWP13 will be the only one to feature a poetry writing police officer. 3pm, Thurs, room 109

A labyrinth of tables (called booths) forms the Book Fair, always a cavernous feature of this thing. The backpacked ones roam its miles of aisles, eyes glazed by the time they reach the D’s or the E’s of university presses and assorted parasitic companies shoving bookmarks, posters, refrigerator magnets, ballpoint pens, and T-shirts at the kids-who-would-not-be-called-kids. They may talk of Seamus Heaney, but they are, as people, very YA.

And tote bags. It is all about the tote bags.

This time of year, our general lament — the industry! the industry! — is replaced most truthfully by another cry: the cluelessness! the cluelessness! Writerly ambition in the world of campus programs seems rarely a thing of this year’s business upheavals or even last year’s screaming matches.

You can find a lovely, robust excitement among the collegiate attendees at AWP, graduates and undergraduates choking hallways to move from one session to another. The problem is the naïveté so frequently found in tandem with this excitement, ignorance rarely relieved by the sessions they attend.

One session on Saturday, for example, numbered S144 in the mystical designations of the program guide, promises to be about “Agents, Editors, and the State of Publishing.” In the event’s description, that “state of publishing” is defined by “the closing of Borders and the growing influence of Amazon.” These are the touchstones for these folks of “the state of publishing.” Borders closing. Amazon growing.

The biggest change by far is the growing voice and footprint of the self-publishing and e-publishing community, and the associated explosion of services for the independent author. While some of these services are much needed and welcome, it’s difficult for a new writer, without a history of experience, to distinguish between a service that’s worth her time or money, and one that is not… Also, there’s been a greater polarization of attitudes—or more strident attitudes—associated with the revolution…This creates the confusion for any writer walking into the current environment. Should you self-publish or traditionally publish?

Jerry Waxler

So, presented with thousands of writers and would-be writers at AWP, wouldn’t you want to look extensively at what is probably, as Friedman notes, the most essential effect of the digital dynamic?

So, wouldn’t AWP be the perfect forum in which to focus less on the esoteric vagaries of poetry and literary analysis and more on the options its young charges will face as soon as they step off the campus curb into the peculiar traffic patterns of publishing today?

On Thursday at AWP, I count roughly some 175 sessions planned. The phrase “self-publishing” turns up in the descriptions of those sessions how many times? Zero.

On Friday, another 175 or so sessions. Mentions of “self-publishing?” Zero.

On Saturday, yet another 175 or so sessions. “Self-publishing?”—it’s mentioned. Once.

And even mentions of things “digital,” in fact, appear in only three sessions each on Thursday and Friday, of a total 350 sessions. On Saturday, I see five sessions with mentions of “digital,” my favorite being this line: “As the best way to gather writerly information, interviewing is being lost to its shady digital cousins.”

I hope you’ll consider me your “shady digital cousin,” won’t you?

I’ll be at #awp13 Thursday – Sunday but I intend to spend most of that time hiding in my hotel* room.*not the conference hotel — elliott holt (@elliottholt) March 3, 2013

So if not what’s going on in writing today, just what are they talking about, you might wonder, at AWP? A few session titles here:

“Women in Crime.” (They mean female writers who “build a crime series around a female protagonist,” apparently, not a roomful of lawbreaking ladies.)

“The Whole Megillah: The Jewish Experience in Children’s Books.”

“Lower Your Standards: William Stafford in the Workshop.” (“Overcoming writer’s block through lowered standards can help students become fluent practitioners.” Great.)

“Poets Out Loud Prize Series: A Reading.” (Because readings are so hard to pull off if they’re not Out Loud, don’t you agree?)

“Arab Women Writing in the 21st Century.”

“Translating Slippery Dreamers: French Surrealist Poetry in the Hands of American Authors.”

“On Labor: Junior Women Faculty in Creative Writing Programs.”

“It Could Always Be Verse: Books in Verse for Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers.”

“What’s That Book About, Anyway? or, The Stealth Memoir in All Its Guises.”

Look out for those stealth memoirs.

From the AWP 2013 online Planning Guide, a ground plan of the first level (of two) of the Book Fair.

You get the idea. There’s a handy at-a-glance (a very big glance) look at the three days’ offerings in a page-turning graphical interface, if you’d like, located here. In this online edition of the conference program you can see the many, many ads for MFA programs vying for attention and announcing their sponsorship of this and that.

AWP is primarily a glimpse at how profoundly separate from commercial publishing interests is the academic world’s concept of book-ly interests—and the way it peddles those interests to the young scholars who will, after all, finally live in our world, not at the Hynes Center. Literary concerns seem to override most of the events. It’s hard to spot much comprehension of the fact that Bowker shows us more than 32 million active titles now bursting its Books in Print’s listings. That tsunami of genre writing in the marketplace (Shirtless Men Kissing Beautiful Women, for example)? We’re whistling past it in parkas and mittens and knit caps, mortar boards with ear muffs.

NJM’s advice on packing for #AWP13 : “Just make sure not ALL of your shirts say ‘Idaho’ on them.” — Sian Griffiths (@BorrowedHorses) March 3, 2013

Watch for the hashtag #AWP13 to follow things this week. I’ve also opened an Epilogger account to aggregate things on the fly — more than 700 tweets were waiting as soon as I set it up, days ahead of the event. Did I mention it’s very large?

It’s in Boston this year. But it sure looks like the other years.

Over 11,000 writers, including me, will be in Boston next week for #AWP13, in case you’re wondering where all the good neurosis is. — David Olimpio (@notsolinear) March 3, 2013